aftermath
Pluralaftermaths
- 1The period and consequences that follow an event, usually a disaster, and often carrying strongly negative associations.
Like the wreckage and lingering smoke that remain once a fire has finally burned itself out.
Relief workers arrived in the aftermath of the earthquake to search for survivors.
The company struggled for years in the aftermath of the financial scandal.
Note
Here the haymaking image has gone figurative: what springs up after the cutting became whatever comes after a blow, the meaning that grew out of the old second-mowing sense. It nearly always follows something bad, such as a war, a quake or a scandal, and it usually takes of: the aftermath of nuclear war. For the results of a happy event, a neutral word such as result sits better.
- 2A second mowing of grass, or the new growth that springs up after the first hay crop has been cut in the same season.
After the first hay crop was gathered, the meadow's aftermath provided fresh grazing for the sheep.
They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay.
1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the CévennesNote
The literal sense behind the word: after- plus math, an old word for "a mowing". Robert Louis Stevenson still uses it in 1879, with farmers cutting aftermath on a gusty autumn morning that smelled untimely of hay. The agricultural use is now obsolete, so in modern prose it reads as a deliberate echo of the farm. The "what follows disaster" meaning is its figurative descendant: what comes up after the harvest.
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Origin
Formed from after- combined with math, an old word meaning "a mowing" (of grass).